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Comment by aban | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, but I'm also concerned about the future of addons like Pentadactyl [0] and Vimperator [1] that use XUL.

I know the user base of these addons is not anywhere as big as Thunderbird, but I can't really imagine using Firefox without Vimperator; and it's already started to break in Firefox 45.

[0]: https://github.com/5digits/dactyl

[1]: https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs

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I'll jump in and mention VimFx [0] here because, having the same concerns, I recently switched over from vimperator. It's lighter than vimperator but gives much of the similar functionality, without completely revamping the browser. And it should continue to work as Firefox moves ahead.

[0] https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx

VimFx (and Vimium for Chrome -- XUL deprecation and the loss of Pentadactyl migth be what finally pushes to switch from Firefox to Chromium) are nice addons but feature wise they do only a small subset of what Vimperator/Pentadactyl do. I use Pentadactyl and I get a lot of use out of writing my own plugins, using autocommands to trigger different actions on different pages, using quickmarks, and using ":js" on the command line to debug javascript code.

I plan to use VimFx/Vimium in the future though because those keyboard patterns are ingrained in me now. Pentadactyl development has dried up over the last few years and it seems unlikely that such a huge change as XUL deprecation will be addressed. The developers have been asked about this several times through different media and not responded. I'm not sure about Vimperator. The developers are still active but porting is a lot of work and currently all of the necessary API's do not exist. Hopefully, I can cobble together something resembling Pentadactyl/Vimperator by using a few other extensions in addition to VimFx/Vimium.

  but I can't really imagine using Firefox without Vimperator

I can second that (s/vimperator/pentadactyl/). pentadactyl at least still works in Firefox 45.

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